This Friday at HIFF, we are delighted to present Telefilm Canada’s Investment Analyst Lori McCurdy’s free nuts and bolts discussion about what every emerging producer and filmmaker needs to know before they yell “Roll camera!” This is Business Affairs 101 and although glamorous it ain’t, essential it is!

This session will take place at the NSCAD University Film School 1649 Brunswick Street at 10AM.

Registration for this event is required. To register, please Click Here.

Also at the NSCAD University Film School 1649 Brunswick Street at 1:00PM, video artist Tom Sherman will present a free artist talk entitled “Technology as Language: Cultural Engineering Begets Personal Humans”.

More and more, people are comfortable comparing themselves with machines. We take pleasure in our relationships with intelligent artifacts. Technology is concrete language, the residue of redundant messages. Cultures are engineered, not grown. Personal humans still like to feel special. It is time to check on the advance of cybernetics–communication and control– and subsequent degrees of roboticism.

Tom Sherman is an artist and writer. He works in video, radio and live performance, and writes all manner of texts. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1980. He founded the Media Arts Section of the Canada Council in 1983. His interdisciplinary work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and the Musee d’art contemporain (Montreal). He performs and records with Bernhard Loibner (Vienna) in a duo called Nerve Theory. His most recent book is Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, The Banff Centre Press, 2002. In 2003 he was awarded the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. He received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Art in 2010. Sherman is a professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University in central New York, but considers the South Shore of Nova Scotia his home.

This talk is presented by Centre for Art Tapes, AFCOOP, and NSCAD University

On Friday evening at 7:00PM at the Bus Stop Theatre 2203 Gottingen Street, HIFF and Dalhousie University present a program of the work of animator Janie Geiser entitled “Animating the Uncanny” with an introduction by the filmmaker. Tickets:$5 Students & Seniors / $7 General

Janie Geiser’s films are elliptical, lush, and uncanny. Geiser – a performance, installation and puppet artist as well as an experimental filmmaker – creates teeming visual landscapes in which puppets, painted figures, found objects and moments of live action crowd together and float, superimposed, across one another. Richly layered sound collages provide striking counterpoint. The audiovisual density conjures submerged desires, fears, and questions that the conscious mind can only partially articulate. Geiser’s work delves into multiple pasts: the personal past of childhood, ruled by memory and forgetting; and an historical past of discarded objects, automata, and the tactility of the film medium. As the animate and inanimate rub shoulders, what emerges is a sense of the fragility and unpredictability of human bodies and minds.

A collection of films made by women from across Atlantic Canada. This screening is presented by WIFT-AT, the Atlantic Canadian chapter of Women in Film & Television (WIFT) serving the four Atlantic Provinces. WIFT is an international organization created in Los Angeles in 1973 to give women who were struggling to have a voice in Television and in Film a network and support system.